Concertgebouw

When this hall was finished it stood in a field outside the city, with no paved road to it and no street lights. It waited more than a year for its first concert.

The Concertgebouw was not built by the city or the state. A company was founded in 1882 to pay for it, and the site it chose was pasture beyond the edge of Amsterdam, in the neighbouring municipality of Nieuwer-Amstel. Building started in 1883.

The architect, Adolf Leonard van Gendt, took the new concert hall in Leipzig as his model. Like everything here, it had to stand on piles: 2,186 of them, each twelve or thirteen metres long, driven down to the sand.

The building was ready late in 1886. Then it sat empty. The municipality still had to fill in a ditch, pave the roads and put up lamps, and it took its time. The opening concert was finally given on 11 April 1888, with an orchestra of 120 and a choir of 500. That autumn the hall’s own orchestra played for the first time.

What nobody could have planned is the sound. The Main Hall is a plain shoebox with a high ceiling, and music lingers in it for a little over two seconds before dying away. Orchestras and conductors have ranked it with the best halls in the world ever since.

A century later it nearly fell down. In 1983 cracks an inch wide appeared in the walls: the wooden piles were rotting and the hall was sinking. From 1985 the piles were replaced with concrete. The glass wing on the side was added in the same years.